EOTO - Terms and Concepts - The Mainstream Media

  

The mainstream media is made up, mostly, of five media conglomerates that serve the news market in the U.S. Usually when people refer to the media they mean the sources that they get their news from, and most recently people have not had a large amount of trust for them. Since the beginning of television, media companies have been financially driven by ads, and those companies who pay to have their ads on TV have certain values that they want to adhere too. Some of these media companies, as seen above, who own news organizations will not run certain stories because it doesn't fit their agenda or makes their "side" look bad or because they want to give their advertisers want they want to hear. Not only does this take away journalistic integrity, but it also creates a monopoly. Five major companies own the vast majority of what we see on TV which means they get to control the narrative of what we see. This doesn't allow for very diverse points of view among different news organizations, especially at the local news level. Local news in today's media society is suppose to be where you can get the most unbiased and accurate news, but even they are starting to be influenced by the large conglomerates who own them. Even if they don't show bias they are spewing the same messages, which doesn't allow for diversity and also takes away from the element of the news being "local." The other dangerous thing about news organizations being owned by conglomerates and entertainment companies is that they don't call out wrongdoings within their own company. The role of journalist and the media is too be watchdogs of the government and criticize any wrongdoing, hence them being considered by some as the "fourth branch of government" implementing checks and balances. This not applies to government wrongdoing, but the private world as well. For example, ABC which is owned by the Walt Disney Company may not run a news story about an internal scandal or wrongdoing within their company because why would they speak bad about themselves. Having media companies owned by more organizations across diverse backgrounds will allow for more integrity based reporting, less bias, and a wide variety of stories.

When is comes to media and reporting bias, I think that organizations are too embroiled in trying to be correct. As humans we have a natural bias, even reporters who try to report the news as unbiased as possible will still have a bias, but when we go so far as to cater to one group then all integrity gets thrown out the window. Even though these media companies do have an agenda, they still have honest and true journalist who just want people to hear the truth. If they have a bias of course they would want to work for an organization who shares that bias. I think that all media organizations share a common goal in that they want to inform people, but most of them get too confused in deciphering what is the truth and opinion and also how biased their truth is. They are good at convincing people that certain stories are the truth, because most of these news outlets never flat out lie but the wording that they use, influenced by their bias, is persuasive enough to convince someone that it is the truth. As consumers of news, we don't want or have time to verify the truth or bias of the news that we consume, we consume news with the hopes that it is accurate and unbiased as possible so that we don't have to double check it. That is why people fall into confirmation bias traps so easily because the news can sound very true, especially if it is something we want to hear and we trust it so much so that we don't have to think about double checking it. Unfortunately in the age of what we consider the mainstream media, it is up to us to decide which news sources are credible enough.